We already don't vote often enough. We shouldn't be making it any harder. We should have automatic registration at birth, and states should check registration every time we have contact with a state agency (like DMV).
Instead, the doors are wide open for skewing the system toward the party in power, through "common sense" rules (often selectively enforced, on top of their direct effects).
Some good tips for the recycling conscious. This one I've been bad about, since every town's different, and I have to locate rules (which change) myself:
After China banned used plastics this year, many municipalities in the United States no longer accept plastics numbered 3 to 7, which can include things like yogurt cups, butter tubs and vegetable oil bottles. Look at the bottom of a container for a number inside a triangle to see what type it is.
We should build more recycling capacity, and educate people on proper recycling practices.
In the past, the municipalities would have shipped much of their used paper, plastics and other scrap materials to China for processing. But as part of a broad antipollution campaign, China announced last summer that it no longer wanted to import “foreign garbage.” Since Jan. 1 it has banned imports of various types of plastic and paper, and tightened standards for materials it does accept.
While some waste managers already send their recyclable materials to be processed domestically, or are shipping more to other countries, others have been unable to find a substitute for the Chinese market. “All of a sudden, material being collected on the street doesn’t have a place to go,” said Pete Keller, vice president of recycling and sustainability at Republic Services, one of the largest waste managers in the country.
Macaroni and cheese has been served as long as there has been a United States of America, but in a 20th-century economy driven by convenience packaging and industrialization, it was elevated to an ideal American food: Pasta and processed cheese are very cheap to make and easy to ship and store, and they certainly fill up a belly. It’s no wonder a hot gooey Velveeta mac and cheese tastes like a winner to so many Americans, even those attending a fancy contest in San Francisco.
I have a collection of quotes I post above my computer for writing inspiration and as a reminder to examine my own historical assumptions. One is from Miller from the Charlotte Observer on November 15, 2017: “They [older black people interviewed by Miller for his book] were convinced mac & cheese was something white people stole from us. I thought they were kidding, but they were like, ‘No, it’s like rock ‘n’ roll—we started that.’ They were serious.”
This is the conundrum and beauty of mac and cheese. It is one person’s survival food, another person’s staple main course, and yet another person’s food of culture and celebration. Divided, as America is, along class and race lines, when you bring up mac and cheese you have to be careful or you may be talking about a different mac and cheese altogether.
The one thing that does seem to unify people who eat macaroni and cheese is that everyone views it as “comfort food”: Whichever form of mac and cheese people grew up with, it provides them with something visceral that they want to recreate as adults...
From self-driving cars to smart assistants, AI is increasingly becoming part of our daily lives and often facilitates actual human-to-human and human-machine-human interaction. Good, bad or indifferent AI is here to stay for the long run. Though as AI becomes exponentially more powerful it also requires a thoughtful examination by the purveyors of AI and the powers to be. Organizations that ought to use AI in a responsible, ethical and transparent way, but how do we control, manage and enforce that?
...
If a self driving car is going left instead of right, killing someone in the process we probably want to know why it did that. More specifically, why did the algorithm decide to go left vs. right and causing an accident. Since most likely human lives will be at stake or can be affected, we’re going to need almost instantaneous reproducibility and interpretability. Answering the question: what just happened, why did it happen and who is going to be liable/responsible if things go wrong...
When Marc Zuckerberg testified before both the House and the Senate last month, it became immediately obvious that few US lawmakers had any appetite to regulate the pervasive surveillance taking place on the internet.
Right now, the only way we can force these companies to take our privacy more seriously is through the market. But the market is broken. First, none of us do business directly with these data brokers. Equifax might have lost my personal data in 2017, but I can't fire them because I'm not their customer or even their user. I could complain to the companies I do business with who sell my data to Equifax, but I don't know who they are. Markets require voluntary exchange to work properly. If consumers don't even know where these data brokers are getting their data from and what they're doing with it, they can't make intelligent buying choices.
This is starting to change, thanks to a new law in Vermont and another in Europe. And more legislation is coming.
...
Surveillance is the business model of the internet. It's not just the big companies like Facebook and Google watching everything we do online and selling advertising based on our behaviors; there's also a large and largely unregulated industry of data brokers that collect, correlate and then sell intimate personal data about our behaviours. If we make the reasonable assumption that Congress is not going to regulate these companies, then we're left with the market and consumer choice. The first step in that process is transparency. These new laws, and the ones that will follow, are slowly shining a light on this secretive industry.
NEW- CLARIFICATION OF WHAT TRUMP WANTS INSURANCE COMPANIES TO BE ABLE TO DENY OR UP-CHARGE FOR:
— Andy Slavitt (@ASlavitt) June 8, 2018
-Asthma inhaler
-Mild anxiety
-Alcoholism
-Toe fungus
-Being 50
-High blood pressure
-Birth control
Individual coverage for cancer, diabetes, a transplant, epilepsy wouldn’t exist https://t.co/CRFEYwEP45
Let's just call him "Mafia Don" from now on.
This week @OpenSecretsDC updated its data tracking (traceable) payments to Trump properties. It shows that, since 2016, GOP party committees, politicians and candidates have paid more than $1.5 million to companies Trump profits from in office https://t.co/BrmujEdqt5
— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) June 6, 2018
Continued:
To put that in perspective, in the preceding 4 cycles -- from 2008 to 2014 -- the GOP spent a combined total of just $166k at Trump properties and companies, about one-tenth of what they've spent since the person benefiting from these payments became the party's standard bearer. And these totals don't even include the funds that the Trump campaign and other Trump-related committees have spent at Trump-owned companies, a total that now stretches to well over $14 million at this point.
When you piece it all together, you see a striking explosion in money flowing from political sources to companies that the president and his family benefit from directly. It can't be said enough (and I say it often): This is not normal.
We're used to hearing that Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm, or that Obama wouldn't even refinance his 5.9 percent mortgage when rates fell. but Trump's decision to eschew the practices of prior administrations is only one part of the equation. The other side is that the president's political allies have chosen not only to keep quiet about the conflicts of interest this arrangement creates, but to embrace them. They have made a conscious choice to schedule political events and fundraisers at places that will benefit the president directly. As we will see again in just a couple of weeks...
None
of
this
is
normal.
It should outrage anyone who believes that a citizens access to and influence over the most powerful people in the country shouldn't derive from the number of commas on their financial statements. And even if we accept that to some degree the wealthy do have more access and influence, we should fight for it to be disclosed, so that we can track how elected officials pay their financial benefactors back with profitable policies.